An August fellow
The
idea, strangely enough, had its genesis in August Wilson’s imminent death.
“It
was reading that he was ill last summer and completing his final play,” says
Mark Cuddy. Cuddy is the artistic director at the GevaTheatreCenter and he’s talking about the
theater’s decision to stage all 10 of Wilson’s
Pittsburgh Cycle of plays starting later this season.
The
cycle, about the African-American experience, includes a play set in each
decade of the 20th century. Wilson
finished that final play that Cuddy references, Radio Golf, in 2005. It premiered, like most of his other plays, at
the Yale Repertory Theatre in May, but he continued to revise it after that. A
month later he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. He died in October.
“He
was rewriting it the month before he died,” says Cuddy, with a hint of awe. It
was an iconic ending for a man who had become as much of an icon as playwright
can be in this country. And it inspired Cuddy, who’d hosted Wilson at Geva
several times in the past.
Often,
Cuddy admits, decisions about what to stage can be time-consuming and
frustrating affairs, where everyone has a different opinions and suggestions.
But when he brought this idea up the reaction was a bit different.
“There
was just a huge grin,” he says. “There was never any more discussing than ‘Oh,
of course.'”
If the
decision to stage all 10 plays was an easy one to make, carrying it out will
be a different matter.
“It’s
a five-year commitment, so that’s pretty big,” says Cuddy. “We’re the only
theater in the country that’s doing this,” he adds. So far that hasn’t
attracted much attention from the national arts press, but Cuddy expects that
to change next spring when the first play gets underway.
Geva plans to put
on two of Wilson’s
plays each year for the next five years. One play each year will be done in a
full stage production while the second will be done in a dramatic reading, both
at Geva and at venues in the community — hopefully
“somewhere in the African American cultural community,” Cuddy says.
Gem
of the Ocean, the play Wilson
set in the 1900s, is the first to be staged, opening next April. Geva hasn’t yet settled on dates for this season’s dramatic
reading, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Specifics for the rest of the cycle
remain unfinished — “We didn’t want to make that commitment yet,” Cuddy says
— but next year will likely see a staged version of The Piano Lesson and
readings of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
“It’s an
ambitious undertaking,” says Jeff Tucker. “I’ll be interested to see how it plays
out.” Tucker is a professor of African-American literature at the University of Rochester. He’s teaching a course in
African-American Drama this semester, and he’s taught plenty of Wilson in the past.
“He’s
contributed immensely to both the traditions of drama and African-American
drama,” says Tucker — but he is quick to add that Wilson’s appeal is far from being purely
academic. The average person on the street might not be able to readily name a
modern playwright, but if they could “perhaps one of the first names that might
come to mind is August Wilson,” Tucker says. The playwright has achieved
worldwide notoriety because of his ability to faithfully render realistic
dialogue. Wilson’s
mastery is apparent “in his representation of African-American conversational
language — the language you hear in black social spaces,” says Tucker. “It
rings true.”
That’s
not to say that Wilson’s
scope or appeal is limited to African Americans. In fact, according to Tucker,
the opposite is true.
“He’s
also done a lot in asserting the importance of African American literature
outside of African Americans,” he says. “The point he’s making is
African-American literature and African-American drama is not just parochial in
scope. It’s universal.”
Both
Tucker and Cuddy share an explanation for how Wilson achieves that: his characters.
“He
writes from the ground up,” says Cuddy. “His characters are rooted to American
soil in a way that not many other characters are.”
Tucker
goes a step further: “Sometimes his characters achieve a kind of mythic
status,” he says, pointing to Trey, the embittered father figure in Fences.
Whatever
else audiences bring away from watching Wilson’s
cycle, says Tucker, “They won’t forget the characters they encounter in the
plays.”
This article appears in Sep 20-26, 2006.
